Twitter has long been a way for people to keep track of tornado watches, train delays, news alerts, or the latest crime alerts from their local police department.
But when the platform, owned by Elon Musk, started stripping blue verification check marks this week from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee, it left government agencies and other organizations around the world scrambling to find a way to show that they are trustworthy and reliable. avoid imitators.
High-profile users who lost their blue diamonds on Thursday include Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey, and former President Donald Trump. But checks were also cleared from bills for major transit systems from San Francisco to Paris, national parks like Yosemite, official weather trackers, and some elected officials.
Twitter had about 400,000 verified users under the original blue-check system. In the past, the checks meant that Twitter verified that users were who they said they were.
While Twitter now offers gold checks for “verified organizations” and gray checks for government organizations and their affiliates, it wasn’t always clear why some accounts had them Friday and others didn’t.
False accounts purporting to represent Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the city’s Department of Transportation and the Illinois Department of Transportation all began sharing posts on Friday falsely claiming that Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive – a major arterial road – is from next month would be closed to private traffic.
A critical eye can detect clear hints of the fraud. The account handles are slightly different from the authentic ones representing Lightfoot and the transport agencies. The fakes also had far fewer followers.
But the fakes used the same photos, biographical text, and home page links as the real ones.
The real accounts of Lightfoot and the transport companies did not have a blue or gray check mark as of Friday. Lightfoot’s office said the city is aware of the fake accounts and is “working with Twitter to resolve this matter.” At least one was suspended on Friday.
A number of agencies said they were waiting for more clarity from Twitter, which has cut its workforce significantly since Musk bought the San Francisco company for $44 billion last year. The confusion has led to concerns that Twitter could lose its status as a platform for getting accurate, up-to-date information from authentic sources, including in emergency situations.
When a tornado was poised to hit central New Jersey earlier this month, a go-to account for information was maintained by the National Weather Service branch in Mount Holly, New Jersey. It had a blue diamond at the time. It no longer has a check, although the main NWS account and some other regional chapters now have a gray check mark marking them as official accounts.
Susan Buchanan, the weather service’s director of public affairs, said the agency is in the process of applying for the gray check for government agencies. She declined to answer why some regional NWS branches lost their tracks and others did.
The fees for keeping the numbers range from $8 per month for individual internet users to a starting fee of $1,000 per month to verify an organization, plus $50 per month for each affiliate or employee account. But the meaning of the blue tick has been changed to symbolize that the user has purchased a premium account that allows their tweets to be seen by more people. It also includes other features such as the ability to edit tweets.
Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to Star Trek author Stephen King and William Shatner, were hesitant to get involved — though all three still had blue checks on Friday after Musk said he paid them himself.
For users who still had a blue check mark, a pop-up message indicated that the account “has been verified because they subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.” Verifying a phone number simply means that the person has a phone number and has verified that they can access it – it does not confirm the person’s identity.
According to an analysis by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based developer of social media tracking software, less than 5% of aging verified accounts appear to have paid to join Twitter Blue.
Musk’s move to end what he calls the “lords & peasants system for those who have or don’t have a blue check” has confused some high-profile users and some right-wing figures and Musk- satisfied fans who thought the markings were unfair. But it’s not an obvious way to make money for the social media platform that has long relied on advertising for most of its revenue.
The mass removal of thousands of blue checks, which had been promised for weeks, was accompanied by a surprise move to drop labels that some media organizations describe as government-funded or state-affiliated. Musk initially championed a policy that lumped public radio and TV stations in the US and other democracies with state-affiliated media outlets in Russia and China, then abruptly changed language, but now Twitter has dropped the labels completely without explanation deleted. The changes came after National Public Radio and other outlets had already stopped using Twitter.
While a few high-profile users said they would stop using Twitter because of blue ticks, many public bodies seemed to stick with the service.
Asked about Friday about the German government’s continued use of Twitter, spokesman Christiane Hoffmann said: “Of course we are watching closely what is happening on Twitter and we are constantly questioning whether it is right to have channels there and how they must continue.”
Hoffmann said the government was concerned about developments on Twitter in recent weeks and months, adding that ministries, spokespersons and Chancellor Olaf Scholz now have gray ticks “for which nothing is paid”.
Minneapolis city officials requested a gray check on the city’s main Twitter account about three weeks ago and received approval for it on Thursday.
Jordan Gildenbach, the city’s digital communications coordinator, said he plans to seek the same for other city-run accounts, including the health department — which was unchecked as of Friday — but said Twitter’s system to review and deciding which accounts are eligible “has never really been clear.”
“From an active shooter situation or a weather-related event, or even the more routine things like blizzards, it’s always a challenge, even with verification, to combat misinformation and rumours,” Gildenbach said. “This is only going to make it harder.”
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and was published from a syndicated news agency feed)
